The 34th Golden Age of Science Fiction: C.M. Kornbluth

by C. M. Kornbluth

  He looked up and drew his breath in sharply. The moons had formed their triangle and held it for a long, long five minutes. Time to turn left. The way was blocked, of course, by ill-tempered trees. He drew the invincible dirk, hoping that the trees did not know enough magic to render the thing just an innocent little brand, and deliberately stepped within reach of one of the trees.

  It lashed out beautifully; Almarish did not have to cut at it. The tentacle struck against the blade and lopped itself clean off. The tree uttered a mournful squeal and tried to find and haul in the severed tentacle with the others. They had a way of sticking them back on again.

  He slashed away heartily, counting them as they fell. With each fresh gush of pussy sap the tree wailed more and more weakly. Finally it drooped, seemingly completely done in. Treachery, of course. He flung a lump of sandstone into the nest of arms and saw them close, slowly and with little crushing power, around it. Were it he instead of the stone, he could have hacked himself free before the thing burst into sand.

  Quite boldly, therefore, he picked his way among the oozing tendrils, now and then cutting at one from the wrist. He gum-shoed past the trunk itself and saw the pulsing membranes quiver malevolently at his step. They had things like this back in Ellil; he felt more than competent to deal with them.

  But ghosts, now—ghosts were something else again. He had never seen a ghost, though the rumors did go about. And if ever ghosts were to be seen, it was in this spot.

  Here the moons did not send their light—he didn’t know why—and the grass underfoot was fatty, round rods. From shrubs shone a vague, reddish light that frayed on a man’s nerves. There was the suggestion of a sound in the air, like the ghost itself of a noise dispersed.

  “Moira,” he said softly. “Snap out of it. I’m scared.”

  A tiny head peeked over the top of his pocket. “Yellow already?” she insultingly asked. “The master of all Ellil’s turning green?”

  “Look,” he said. “Just you tell me what we’re up against and I’ll go ahead. Otherwise, no.”

  “Ghosts,” she said. “This place is a den of them. I suppose you’ve heard all the stories about them and don’t quite believe. Well, the stories are true. Just forget about the whimsy à la John Kendrick Bangs. Ghosts aren’t funny; they’re the most frightening things that ever were. There’s nothing you can do about them; none of the magical formulas work because they aren’t even magical. They are distilled essence of terror in tactile form. There’s absolutely nothing you can do with, to, or about them. I can’t give you a word of advice. You know what you have to do, whiskers. We’re after that vial of tears.”

  “Right,” he said. “Keep your head out—here we go.”

  He—they—walked into a vast glob of darkness that saturated their minds, seeped between their molecules and into their lungs and hearts.

  “Oh my God!” wailed a voice. “Oh, my God!”

  Almarish didn’t turn his head; kept walking straight on.

  “Stranger—help me—here they come—” the voice shrilled. There was a sickening sound of crackling, then a mushy voice that spoke a few indistinguishable words.

  “They’re at it,” said Moira tremulously. “Don’t let it get you down.”

  “A big man like you,” said the sweet voice of a young girl, “consorting with that evil little creature! You ought to be ashamed of yourself. I’m ever so much nicer.…”

  In the gooey blackness appeared a figure—wispy, luminous—of a charming maiden whose head was a skull and whose hair was a convolution of pink, writhing worms. Gently they hissed in chorus:

  “Bold, big master,

  Come to terms;

  Feed the dainty

  Maid of Worms.”

  The last line of the ditty echoed from all sides in a variety of voices, ranging from a new-born wail to the hoarseness of a death rattle.

  Almarish shut his eyes and walked ahead as the Maid reached out her arms. He walked into her and felt a clammy, gelid coldness, the tightness of arms around him, and ropy things fumbling on his face. Repressing a shriek, breathing heavily, he strode on, finally opening his eyes. Again he—they—were in the blackness, without a sound or light. Fumbling for a handkerchief, he swabbed at his brow and cheeks, dripping with cold sweat. As he thought of the Maid again, his back rose into little prickles of ice.

  “It was me,” he said, trembling violently, “who could never stand mice and roaches, Moira.”

  “Keep going,” she snapped coldly. “This isn’t a picnic.” The little creature was upset again. Almarish walked on, missed his footing and fell, sprawling grotesquely. Slowly he drifted down through unimaginable depths of blackness, reaching out frantically for holds, and there were none.

  “Stop it!” shrilled Moira. “Stop struggling!”

  Obediently he relaxed. His fall ended with a bump, on a twilit road sloping gently downward as far as the eye could see. There was a vague, rumbling noise underfoot, as if there were heavy carts on the road.

  He looked up along the road. Something was coming, and it was brutally big. Legless, it rolled along on iron wheels, coming at him. The thing was a flattened ovoid of dark, sharkish gray, and like a shark it had a gruesome, toothy slit of mouth. Growing bigger and bigger, it thundered down the road as he watched, petrified, his own mouth open in childish alarm.

  A shrill scream from his pocket brought him to. “Jump, you dummy!” shrieked Moira. “Jump!” He leaped into the air as the thing, its triangular mouth snapping savagely, teeth clashing, thundered beneath him.

  He watched it go on down the road, still cold with terror.

  “Can it come back?” he asked.

  “Of course not,” said Moira. “Could you roll uphill?”

  “You’re right,” he said. “Quite right. But what do we do now?” He mopped his brow again.

  “Look,” said the little creature kindly. “I know how you feel, but don’t worry. You’re doing a lot better than you think you are. We’ll be out of this in a minute, if you don’t break down.” She looked sharply into his face.

  “Maybe I won’t,” he said. “I’m not making promises, the way I feel. What—what in Hades—?”

  He—they—were snatched up by a gigantic wind and were sucked through the air like flies in an air-conditioning plant.

  “Close your eyes,” said Moira. “Close them tight and think of something—anything—except what’s going to happen to you. Because if you think of something else, it won’t happen.”

  Almarish squeezed his eyes tight shut as a thunderous droning noise filled his ears. “Ex sub one sub two,” he gabbled, “equals ei square plus two ei plus the square root of bee plus and minus ei square minus two ei bee over two ei.” The droning roar was louder; he jammed his thumbs into his ears.

  He felt a hideous impulse to open his eyes. Little, stinging particles of dust struck against his neck.

  Flying through the air, turning over and over, the droning roar became one continual crash that battered against his body with physical force. There was one indescribable, utterly, incomparably violent noise that nearly blew his brain out like an overload of electricity. Then things became more or less quiet, and he tumbled onto a marshy sort of ground.

  “All clear?” he asked, without opening his eyes.

  “Yes,” said Moira. “You were magnificent.”

  He lifted his lids warily and saw that he sat on a stretch of forest sward. Looking behind him—

  “My God!” he screamed. “Did we go through that?”

  “Yes,” said Moira. “It’s a ghost—unless you’re afraid of it, it can’t hurt you.”

  Behind them, the thousand-foot blades of a monstrous electric fan swirled brilliantly at several hundred r.p.s. The noise reached them in a softening blur of sound. Gently it faded away.

  Almarish of Ellil leaned back quietly.
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br />   “The big calf!” muttered Moira. “Now he faints on me!”

  10

  “Now,” said Almarish, “what about this happy animal?”

  “La Bête Joyeux?” asked the little creature.

  “If that’s what its name is. Why this damned nonsense about tears?”

  “It’s a curse,” said Moira grimly. “A very terrible curse.”

  “Then it’ll keep. Who’s in there?”

  He pointed to a stony hut that blocked the barely defined trail they were following. Moira shaded her tiny eyes and wrinkled her brow as she stared. “I don’t know,” she admitted at last. “It’s something new.”

  Almarish prepared to detour. The stone door slid open. Out looked a wrinkled, weazened face, iron-rimmed spectacles slid down over the nose. It was whiskered, but not as resplendently as Almarish’s, whose imposing mattress spread from his chin to his waist. And the beard straggling from the face was not the rich mahogany hue of the sorcerer’s, but a dirty white, streaked with gray and soup stains.

  “Hello,” said Almarish amiably, getting his fingers around the invincible dirk.

  “Beaver!” shrilled the old man, pointing a dirty-yellow, quavering, derisive finger at Almarish. Then he lit a cigarette with a big, apparently homemade match and puffed nervously.

  “Is there anything,” inquired the sorcerer, “we can do for you? Otherwise we’d like to be on our way.”

  “We?” shrilled the old man.

  Almarish realized that Moira had retreated into his pocket again. “I mean I,” he said hastily. “I was a king once—you get into the habit.”

  “Come in,” said the old man quaveringly. By dint of extraordinarily hard puffing, he had already smoked down the cigarette to his yellowed teeth. Carefully he lit another from its butt.

  Almarish did not want to come in. At least he had not wanted to, but there was growing in his mind a conviction that this was a very nice old man, and that it would be a right and proper thing to go in. That happy-animal nonsense could wait. Hospitality was hospitality.

  He went in and saw an utterly revolting interior, littered with the big, clumsy matches and with cigarette butts smoked down to eighth-inches and stamped out. The reek of nicotine filled the air; ashtrays deep as water buckets overflowed everywhere onto the floor.

  “Perhaps,” said the sorcerer, “we’d better introduce ourselves. I’m Almarish, formerly of Ellil.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” shrilled the ancient. Already he was chain-smoking his third cigarette. “My name’s Hopper. I’m a geasan.”

  “What?”

  “Geasan—layer-on of geases. A geas is an injunction which can’t be disobeyed. Sit down.”

  Almarish felt suddenly that it was about time he took a little rest. “Thanks,” he said, sitting in a pile of ashes and burned matches. “But I don’t believe that business about you being able to command people.”

  The geasan started his sixth cigarette and cackled shrilly. “You’ll see. Young man, I want that beard of yours. My mattress needs restuffing. You’ll let me have it, of course.”

  “Of course,” said Almarish. Anything at all for a nice old man like this, he thought. But that business about geases was too silly for words.

  “And I may take your head with it. You won’t object.”

  “Why, no,” said the sorcerer. What in Hades was the point of living, anyway?

  Lighting his tenth cigarette from the butt of the ninth, the geasan took down from the wall a gigantic razor.

  A tiny head peeked over the top of the sorcerer’s pocket.

  “Won’t you,” said a little voice, “introduce me, Almarish, to your handsome friend?”

  The eleventh cigarette dropped from the lips of the ancient as Almarish brought out Moira and she pirouetted on his palm. She cast a meaningful glance at the geasan. “Almarish is such a boor,” she declared. “Not one bit like some men.…”

  * * * *

  “It was the cigarettes that gave him his power, of course,” decided the sorcerer as he climbed the rocky bluff.

  “My size,” purred Moira, “only a little taller, of course. Women like that.” She began to snore daintily in his pocket.

  Almarish heaved himself over the top of the bluff, and found himself on a stony plain or plateau scattered with tumbled rocks.

  “Vials, sir?” demanded a voice next to his ear.

  “Ugh!” he grunted, rapidly sidestepping. “Where are you?”

  “Right here.” Almarish stared. “No—here.” Still he could see nothing.

  “What was that about vials?” he asked, fingering the dirk.

  Something took shape in the air before his eyes. He picked it out of space and inspected the thing. It was a delicate bottle, now empty, designed to hold only a few drops. Golden wires ran through the glass forming patterns suggestive of murder and other forms of sudden death.

  “How much?” he asked.

  “That ring?” suggested the voice. Almarish felt his hand being taken and one of his rings being twisted off.

  “Okay,” he said. “It’s yours.”

  “Thanks ever so much,” replied the voice gratefully. “Miss Megaera will love it.”

  “Keep away from those Eumenides, boy,” Almarish warned. “They’re tricky sluts.”

  “I’ll thank you to mind your own business, sir,” snapped the voice. It began to whistle an air, which trailed away into the distance.

  From behind one of the great, tumbled cairns of rock slid, with a colossal clashing of scales, a monster.

  “Ah, there,” said the monster.

  Almarish surveyed it carefully. The thing was a metallic cross among the octopus, scorpion, flying dragon, tortoise, ape and toad families. Its middle face smiled amiably, almost condescendingly, down on the sorcerer.

  “You the Bête Joyeux?” asked Almarish.

  “See here,” said the monster, snorting a bit and dribbling lava from a corner of its mouth. “See here—I’ve been called many things, some unprintable, but that’s a new one. What’s it mean?”

  “Happy animal, I think,” said Almarish.

  “Then I probably am,” said the monster. It chuckled. “Now what do you want?”

  “See this vial? It has to be filled with your tears.”

  “So what?” asked the monster, scratching itself.

  “Will you weep for me?”

  “Out of sheer perversity, no. Shall we fight now?”

  “I suppose so,” said Almarish, heavyhearted. “There’s only one other way to get your tears that I can think of. Put up your dukes, chum.”

  The monster squared off slowly. It didn’t move like a fighter; it seemed to rely on static fire power, like a battle-tank. It reached out a tentacle whose end opened slowly into a steaming nozzle. Almarish snapped away as a squirt of sulfurous matter gushed from the tip.

  With a lively blow the sorcerer slashed off the tentacle, which scuttled for shelter. The monster proper let out a yell of pain. One of its lionlike paws slapped down and sidewise at Almarish; he stood his ground and let the thing run into the dirk its full length, then jumped inside the thing’s guard and scaled its shoulder.

  “No fair!” squalled the monster.

  He replied with a slash that took off an ear. The creature scratched frantically for him, but he easily eluded the clumsy nails that raked past its hide. As he danced over the skin, stabbing and slashing more like a plowman than a warrior, the nails did fully as much damage as he did.

  Suddenly, treacherously, the monster rolled over. Almarish birled it like a log in a pond, harrowing up its exposed belly as it lay on its back.

  Back on its feet again, the thing was suddenly still. The sorcerer, catching his breath, began to worry. The squawking pants that had been its inhalations and exhalations had stopped. But it wasn’t dead,
he knew. The thing was holding its breath. But why was it doing that?

  The temperature of the skin began to rise, sharply. So, thought Almarish, it was trying to smoke him off by containing all its heat! He scrambled down over its forehead. The nostril flaps were tight shut. Seemingly, it breathed only by its middle head, the one he was exploring.

  His heels were smoking, and the air was growing super-heated. Something had to be done, but good and quick.

  With a muttered prayer, Almarish balanced the dirk in his hand and flung it with every ounce of his amazing brawn. Then, not waiting to see the results, he jumped down and ran frantically to the nearest rock. He dodged behind it and watched.

  The dirk had struck home. The nostril flaps of the monster had been pinned shut. He chuckled richly to himself as the thing pawed at its nose. The metallic skin was beginning to glow red-hot, then white.

  He ducked behind the rock, huddled close to it as he saw the first faint hairline of weakness on the creature’s glowing hide.

  Crash! It exploded like a thunderclap. Parts whizzed past the rock like bullets, bounced and skidded along the ground, fusing rocks as they momentarily touched.

  Almarish looked up at last. La Bête Joyeux was scattered over most of the plateau.

  Almarish found the head at last. It had cooled down considerably; he fervently hoped that it had not dried out. With the handle of his dirk he pried up the eyelid and began a delicate operation.

  Finally the dead-white sac was in his hands. Unstoppering the vial, he carefully milked the tear gland into it.

  “Moira,” he said gently, shaking her.

  * * * *

  “You ox!”

  She was awake in a moment, ill-tempered as ever.

  “What is it now?”

  “Your vial,” he said, placing it on his palm beside her.

  “Well, set it down on the ground. Me, too.” He watched as she tugged off the stopper and plunged her face into the crystal-clear liquid.